What an amazing year. This time last year my report was glowing. We had recovered from the Darfield earthquake and were operating pretty much as normal, except for offering extra   support to locals who needed a place to drop in when they felt vulnerable with the aftershocks. We were patting ourselves on the back, while gearing up for a still busy cruise ship and visitor season.

It didn’t seem to take people long to get used to the shaking and things slowly returned to some sort of normality.  A quarter of our annual income comes via funding from the Christchurch City Council, and we successfully lobbied the Council to keep this funding for  another twelve months; more volunteers kept joining; the volunteer training sessions kept rolling along; more operators were joining; and we made progress with Christchurch and Canterbury Tourism through a meeting with the new chief executive. We created a refreshed strategic plan in January and it was full steam ahead for a year of increased business, new product, new directories, exhibitions, cluster days and the like.